Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 5

Monday Morning Links!

The latest Grad School Achebe not-so-mini-episode is up! This one is about two of Achebe’s short stories, “Marriage Is A Private Affair” and “Dead Man’s Path.” It was one of our best conversations yet, on some of the slightest literary territory we’ve yet staked out…More good podcast news: the Ranged Touch Homestuck podcast is a reality.ICYMI: I’ll be doing a lecture and seminar series as a virtual scholar-in-residence @TheRosenbach this fall on four of Octavia Butler’s novels. Here are the details! We’re reading Kindred, Wild Seed, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower…CFP: LGBTQIA+ Fantastika Graphics: A Digital Symposium November 20th, 2021.An assistant professor position in transgender studies at UC Davis.The results of Marquette AAUP’s financial analysis of the university is also out: Independent Analysis Reveals That Marquette University Finances Are Solid — Faculty Demand Greater Role in Financial Decisions and an End to Layoffs.A long-delayed interview with me for the Schmitt Fellowship “Leadership” project is up now with lengthy disclaimer indicating that I speak for no one but myself (which is true!).Cornell helpfully announces its intention to violate the ADA.

This is straight-up illegal and somebody in the office of the general counsel at Cornell should know it. https://t.co/M0D1PIWzmq

— Michael Bérubé (@MichaelBerube1) August 13, 2021

Why Mass Effect is some of the best sci-fi ever made.Blood, gore and a healthy dose of catharsis: why horror can be good for us. The H Word: Post-Human Horror.John Carpenter Interview: “I’m not the biggest fan of talking about my films – but let’s do it.”Inside the Nichelle Nichols conservativorship battle.‘Welcome To Cleveland’ rooftop still baffling Milwaukee passengers decades later.‘Mind blowing’: Grizzly bear DNA maps onto Indigenous language families.Unnerving gender hypothetical corner.

this is *wild,* the sort of thing i would make up as an "unnerving gender hypothetical" that turns out to have once been routine medical practice: putting cis girls on hrt to keep them from getting "too tall"
https://t.co/Mn2f5uYKBC

— Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@perdricof) August 14, 2021

Milwaukee took a big hit in the new census numbers. The question is whether they’re accurate.‘Be Paranoid’: Professors Who Teach About Race Approach the Fall With Anxiety.Higher Ed Has a Credibility Problem.July was world’s hottest month ever recorded, US scientists confirm. It’s now or never. “How long can a fish hold its breath?”Andrew Cuomo: A Life. Time’s Up to re-evaluate conflict-of-interest policy in wake of Cuomo scandal.Why California is beating Florida and Texas on the Delta variant (so far). Inside America’s Covid-reporting breakdown. In the West, a Connection Between Covid and Wildfires. Delta Variant Raises Questions as Campuses Start Semester. Hey, Is Delta Bad for Kids? Yes and no. Why Parents Shouldn’t Hunker Down and Wait for a “Return to Normal”. COVID School Year Three. Covid Vaccines for Kids Can’t Wait.

Each day the question is how can this possibly get worse. Worster. Worstest. And it does.
New records set daily, cases >25,000, hospitalizations >16,000, 31.9% test positivity, increasing deaths pic.twitter.com/V70wrA0x9z

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 14, 2021

I Can’t Stop Thinking About the First Chapter of This Climate Change Novel: A conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson about The Ministry for the Future and this summer’s extreme heat.How a Board Game About Birds Became a Surprise Blockbuster.And ladies and gentleman: the Graveyard of Empires.

Friday Links!

my fall plans / delta variant pic.twitter.com/55UwaOEsx1

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2021

I’ll be doing a lecture and seminar series as a virtual scholar-in-residence at The Rosenbach this fall on four of Octavia Butler’s novels. Here are the details! We’re reading Kindred, Wild Seed, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower…Transfer Orbit dives into the latest on The Last Dangerous Visions.In Praise of the Info Dump: A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction.Alien again, again.Music to my ears: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the MyPillow Guy Are in Huge Trouble. Not as great: A rogue DOJ lawyer almost kept Trump in office.When they fantasize about killing you, believe them.Breakthrough cases may be a bigger problem than you thought. Children’s hospitals are swamped with Covid patients — and it may only get worse. How the Pandemic Ends Now.Census minute: Census Bureau releases population data, starting scramble to redraw congressional lines. We’re Going The Wrong Way. Wisconsin grows modestly and more diverse while Milwaukee plummets to 1930s levels, Census data show. Milwaukee city workers moved out in droves after the residency rule ended. It was a boon for the suburbs. Wisconsin as democracy desert.And in local news: Milwaukee’s comedy market is surging with new Improv club, more shows as people seek escape from COVID-19.Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut.” Your favorite senator and mine, Ron Johnson, features prominently.A people’s history of the Karen.The fall of Snopes.com.A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Now it’s official!Put a man on the moon by whenever you get around to it.UFOs and the Boundaries of Science.Why Are Young People So Obsessed With Cults? A sweeping drug addiction risk algorithm has become central to how the US handles the opioid crisis. It may only be making the crisis worse. What’s the matter with book reviews?Climate Denial, Covid Denial and the Right’s Descent.A New Idea That Could Help Us Understand Autism.And what happens when the bugs all die?

we are confronted with a planetary ecological crisis whose scale and severity is absolutely without precedent in human history and the primary political and aesthetic response is calling out people for being “doomers”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2021

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you. pic.twitter.com/ciP9JaLtZY

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 10, 2021

A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag

Some of my own stuff that’s gone up lately: Grad School Achebe #3: No Longer at Ease, my review of Lynell George’s A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” from American Literature 93.2, and my scorching hot take on Loki and Black Widow.(There’s a mini-scorching-hot-take on Loki and The Suicide Squad in this Twitter thread if you’re needing more.)I also have a harder-to-get piece in this handbook to comics and graphic narratives about why Jimmy Corrigan is (hear me out) just a really great comic. Cancel me if you must!The current issue of SFFTV, on sf and games, was really great — read the interview section for free!The current issue of Extrapolation is great too — but no freebies there.

this but for all of science fiction #SFRA21 https://t.co/lSf60ivJxP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2021

I have a nice little cameo in this great Butler story at LARB: Octavia Butler and the Pimply, Pompous Publisher. And I was interviewed for this piece on quantum mechanics and science fiction at The Quantum Daily.Hit me up Hollywood! Adaptations coming of Kindred , Parable of the Sower, and Fledgling, joining Wild Seed and Dawn. In addition to having a ton of great stuff in it, SFRA Review 51.3 is a very important issue of SFRA Review, including candidate statements for the fall election and proposed revision of the bylaws.CFP – Strange Novel Worlds? Star Trek Novels and Fiction Collections in Popular Culture, 31 Aug 2021. Call for submissions: Just Utopias. CFP: Tabletop Teaching: Board Games and Social Justice. CFP: Dissenting Beliefs: Heresy and Heterodoxy in Fantasy. CFP: Religious Futurisms. CFP: Extrapolation: Special Issue on Speculative Fiction’s Intersections with Posthumanism and New Materialism. CFP: SFFTV, “Oversights.” New book series: Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Culture.A messy utopia is all we get. The Novel Solutions of Utopian Fiction. From the depths of the pandemic towards an ecosocialist utopia. Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded. MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. Dangerous Heat Wave Is Literally Melting Critical Infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest. 72% of the western US is currently in “severe” drought or worse. This is now the most extensive severe drought in recorded history. Six of California’s seven largest wildfires have erupted in the past year. Ground Temperatures Hit 118 Degrees in the Arctic Circle. Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse. The climate crisis haunts Chicago’s future. Drought deeps in Minnesota. By the mid-2030s even the moon won’t save us from regular floods as sea levels rise, says NASA. The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’. Joe Biden Is Already Failing on Climate Policy. There’s no going back, so what can be saved?

"Today, the combination of truly dangerous heat and humidity is rare. But by 2050, parts of the Midwest and Louisiana could see conditions that make it difficult for the human body to cool itself for nearly one out of every 20 days in the year."https://t.co/C41QGnwWCi

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 29, 2021

"According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, tells the @latimes. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling." https://t.co/IbpzNgQrgB

— Michael Hawthorne (@scribeguy) July 12, 2021

Lots going on but for me the big story is the environment on which all human society depends is undergoing a collapse so staggeringly rapid there are now multiple climate disasters across the US every week and you still can’t get representative democracy to even pretend to care.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2021

do you ever think about how the proposition that the Earth should remain inhabitable is an absolutely fringe position in US politics, without representation in either political party and routinely mocked by essentially all mass media of any sort

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 24, 2021

"The Climate Change Review of Books" has a nice ring to it https://t.co/Ry4SkA8ElH

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) June 25, 2021

As meteorologist @EricHolthaus described the record heat: “We’ve left the era of fucking around, and we’re now entering the era of finding out.”

— Tim Dickinson (@7im) June 29, 2021

The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.I Am Supposed To Be Writing.DC11 becomes a site of acute thermodynamics, as server heat multiplies server heat. If anything, the true threat comes from within, not without, as unchecked servers would overheat themselves into oblivion. Put bluntly: the tech industry makes our planet hot in the service of keeping its computers cool. This, I suggest, is what makes DC11 a specifically atmospheric media object. DC11’s reliance on and manipulation of air contributes to the cloud’s formal tendencies toward displacement and (re)centralization. Air expedites the transformation of data centers into climate bunkers. Furthermore, the air’s perceived insubstantiability, compared with other subjects of environmental media study, such as rare earth metals or wastewater, makes its pollution that much more challenging to account. Faced with these atmospheric operations, media studies must develop analytical techniques that pierce through the data center’s security veil to reveal how the cloud now programs the atmosphere against itself. The humanities are shrinking, except at community colleges.IHE profiles my Greensboro pal Jillian Weise. And another Greensboro friend is hitting the big time with a great new memoir.Trees as more-than-human collectives.Let’s Rank Every Ted Chiang Story Ever Published.How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible.A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment.Accelerated History: Chinese Short Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.You can now listen to “The Three Body Problem” as a serialized podcast.The Futuristic Stink of Amazon’s Science Fiction.75 New and Upcoming Sci-Fi and Fantasy from African Authors.Doctor Who is Anglofuturism.The Anarres Project.Very cool things happening at ASU.

Time travel is always developed as society crumbles, prompting the rich to flee into the past. There they assume positions of power, which makes the timeline even worse, while also speeding up the development of time travel. Each loop is shorter and nastier than the one before.

— Micro Flash Fiction (@MicroFlashFic) July 4, 2021

Remembering Climate Change: A Message from the Year 2071.How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents. Future Lord of the Rings films should acknowledge the book’s queer leanings.

It’s very easy to imagine asking a room full of students “How is Frodo’s story like that of Beren?”, filling a white board with correspondences, asking, “Wait, if Frodo is like Beren, then who is his Luthien?” And then everyone’s eyes go wide as they realize the implications. 6/7

— Jason Tondro (@doctorcomics) July 1, 2021

Study finds that few major AI research papers consider negative impacts.The Economic Recovery Is Here. It’s Unlike Anything You’ve Seen.Make Americans’ Crushing Debt Disappear.The Clintons Had Slaves.California mandated masks. Florida opened its restaurants. Did any of it matter? How We’ll Know It’s Finally Time to Stop Masking.

Pretty damn impressive
Thanks Darren Lu @Reddit pic.twitter.com/ST6ueaaoY1

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2021

Every piece of data from real-life shows the vaccines work very, very well— yes, even against Delta. Just checked US vaccine breakthrough hospitalizations. It's 6,587 people among the ~163,000,000 vaccinated: or 0.004%. Three fourths are elderly— as happens with other diseases. https://t.co/TmZkxRlETk pic.twitter.com/fUaTyXprey

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 1, 2021

What this implies is that, while liberal democracy witnessed a struggle for recognition, neoliberalism converts this into a struggle for reputation. The cultural achievement of commercial society, according to Honneth, drawing on Hegel, was that it enabled individuals to confront one another on the principle of equality via exchange. The rise of criticism in the bourgeois public sphere saw artworks judged on a principle of aesthetic autonomy—that is, independent of status. The ideal critic resembled the ideal consumer in the spot market, determining the value of each product on its intrinsic merits. But if, as Feher argues, neoliberal capitalism reconfigures social relations around the template of financial investment, the public sphere becomes governed by a very different temporality. Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation. Every artefact, identity, moral action and political demand becomes viewed as an addition to an archive of prior behaviour, revealing a pattern to be projected into the future. The present is only ever a new data point. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media.Luxury Surveillance.Things of Beauty: The Politics of Postmillennial Nostalgia for Mid-century Design.Utopia of Quirk: Mystery Men (1999) and the Fate of the Nerd.Our World, Our People: Nationalism and Sovereign Power in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”Regulation as near-mystical abstraction.The Many Deaths of Neoliberalism. Liberalism in Theory and Practice. Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists.“Cat Person” and Me.Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn.’How Marvel conquered culture.WandaVision Not Television: Franchise on the Small Screen.The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk.”Time For The End Of The Teen Gymnast.

The decentring of the He-Man/Skeletor binary paves the way for the universalist ecological struggle to save Eternia’s magic; or the cultural logic of Mattel in the age of disaster capitalism… https://t.co/dht0sd9Wv6

— Historicizing Matt is Negating the Negation ⵄ (@MattFlisfeder) July 26, 2021

Strange Plaque Piques Interest On North Farwell In Milwaukee.Still thinking about this tweet from Juneteeth.How Chapel Hill Bungled a Star Hire. The Miseducation of White Children.Catholic colleges ignored faculty handbook provisions in layoffs, report alleges. Unlivable faculty wages put Catholic higher education in existential crisis. The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020-21. The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas.Academentia: the Organization Insanity of the Modern University. The Work of Culture: Of Barons, Dark Academia, and the Corruption of Language in the Neoliberal University.For College Finances, There’s No ‘Return to Normal.’The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did.What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money?Antiracism in the contemporary university.Betrayed by the Dream Factory. The Master’s Trap: What makes a graduate program predatory? ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off.The end of the NCAA.The other freshman class.

Before the new academic job season starts, here’s the numbers for 2020-21, as gleaned from jobs listed on the Academic Jobs Wiki under “English literature” or “Ethnic studies” during that and previous academic years. Overall, like every year since 2017, it was the worst year yet. pic.twitter.com/1lHiCfT8Vk

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) August 7, 2021

So, most people are unaware that One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the novel, has a bonkers sequel called The Starlight Barking. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What the NBA Championship Means to Me.The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick.The Green Imagination in Board Game Landscapes. Mother Lands is a tabletop role-playing game free of slavery and colonialism. Board games have a colonialism problem. One of my favorite scientific figures is this one of the entropy levels of 100 world cities by the orientation of streets. 12 Insane Facts About He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe.Who will police Mars?

Every Gen Xer loves The Goonies, because we really wanted to believe there was some treasure or redemption or some kind of meaning in our abandonment

— The Actual, Real Cormac McCarthy (@_Shan_Martinez_) June 21, 2021

Adjunct hell: the rise of the new campus novel.Generational politics is a socialism of fools.He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence.There will be blood: women on the shocking truth about periods and perimenopause.​The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons.The beauty of Earth from orbit.Aliens could have spotted Earth cross the sun from more than 1,700 star systems. A Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. The new American religion of UFOs. What if the truth isn’t out there?With UFO report making headlines, Wisconsin has its own history with the paranormal.Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams.And don’t cry for me, I’m already dead.

pic.twitter.com/j2NWCkNdoy

— Against late capitalism ☭ Ⓐ (@Inhumansoflate1) June 26, 2021

GSA #3: NO LONGER AT EASE!

Sixty years later, Gerry and Aaron are joined by Keguro Macharia to talk about No Longer at Ease! Should it be illegal to teach Things Fall Apart without also teaching its sequel? Find out within…

Call for Papers: SFFTV 15th anniversary issue, “Oversights”

For its fifteen anniversary issue, Science Fiction Film and Television invites submissions for a special issue loosely organized around the theme of “oversights” — that is, those texts from sf film, television, and interactive media that have not yet been a primary subject of an article in the journal. 

We see the special issue as a moment for canon creation, reconsideration, deconstruction, and deformation. What in sf, and in sf-adjacent genres, have we left out? What texts should become part of the core of the next fifteen years of SFFTV? We especially welcome submissions from outside the Hollywood system, outside the “blockbuster” media form, and outside the US and UK. 

Writers interested in pitching for the issue should contact Gerry Canavan at gerry.canavan@marquette.edu to confirm that the text you want to write about is eligible for the issue. (No need to do anything here but ask after the title.) After that, initial 6000-12000-word drafts will be due January 1, 2022. Articles not selected for the special issue will still be considered for regular issues of the journal.

Please note that beginning with its next volume, SFFTV will be switching to US spelling and Chicago-style citation. The updated SFFTV style guide will be made available to authors.

A full list of ineligible texts is much too lengthy to provide, but as you might expect much of the standard canon of SFFTV has already appeared, including 2001, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Akira, The Alien series, Arrival, Avatar, Back to the Future, Battlestar Galactica, Battlefield Earth, Black Mirror, Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, Children of Men, A Clockwork Orange, The Cloverfield movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still, District 9, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, E.T., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Evangelion, eXistenZ, Ex Machina, Firefly/Serenity, Frankenstein, Fringe, Get Out, Ghost in the Shell, Godzilla, Gravity, Gremlins, Hard to Be a God, Her, The Hunger Games, I Am Legend, Inglourious Basterds, IT, Lost, Lost in Space, Lucy, Mad Max, Minority Report, Monsters, The Matrix and its sequels, The MCU, Moon, The Omega Man, Orphan Black, Planet of the Apes, Primer, Robocop, The Running Man, Source Code, Soylent Green, Starship Troopers, The Star Trek franchise, The Star Wars franchise, Stranger Things, The Terminator franchise, The Thing, The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, Under the Skin, WALL-E, and The X-Files. Put all such films out of your mind — and please bring us instead your neglected and forgotten classics, your cult masterpieces, your triumphs of global cinema, and your weird obscurities…

new book series: MASS MARKETS: STUDIES IN FRANCHISE FICTION

Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures (University of Minnesota Press)

Series editors: Gerry Canavan (Marquette University) and Benjamin J. Robertson (University of Colorado Boulder)

contact: gerrycanavan@gmail.com

Mission Statement

“90% of everything is crap.” —Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon’s Law suggests that the bulk of cultural production is not worthy of our attention, except perhaps as a guilty pleasure. However, as popular media storyworlds increasingly dominate the global entertainment landscape, they call out for serious criticism. The “Mass Markets” of our series title refers both to the audiences who consume media franchises and immerse themselves in those storyworlds and to one of the key media forms through which this consumption has taken place, the mass market paperback. This series thus investigates an archive traditional scholarship typically ignores—from video game franchises to longstanding comic storylines, from fantasy trilogies to Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood blockbusters—even as it expands that archive to include cultural productions by marginalized auteurs and from the world beyond North America and Europe. These studies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ most visible cultural texts are written for critics and fans interested in thinking through the joys and problems mass markets and their fandoms create.

Mass Markets books are 40,000 – 60,000 words each, focused on storyworlds developed in specific franchises and dedicated to expanding our understanding of what franchises can be and who can create and study them. Briefly put, Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures takes up popular narratives (from books and film to television, games, comics, and beyond) that:

are produced and distributed across relatively long timescales;extend across multiple media (including film, television, streaming services, video games, books, comics, and, in certain cases, toys and other commodities);generate extensive narrative storyworlds, both textually and through paratexts like maps, glossaries, indexes, and digital extensions like authorized encyclopedias and fan wikis;have been produced by multiple writers, pen names, and work-for-hire journeymen rather than in accordance with elite notions of “authors” or “auteurs”;are often governed more by a top-down corporate vision than aesthetic and political considerations;and are created for large, mainstream audiences (although they may also contain Easter eggs and others sorts of fan service directed to longstanding fans of the franchise or the genre more generally).

The series aims not to produce full or complete histories of various franchises: their dates of inception, long lists of their various texts and descriptions of the relations among them, the economics and studio maneuvering behind their productions, and so on. Such nondiegetic history is necessary to the series, and we expect the individual texts that make up the series to situate the storyworlds they address in larger cultural movements and historical moments. However, the series shall focus on the diegetic natures of the worlds themselves created by franchises that wish to leverage those worlds into a sustainable condition for storytelling and profit, as well as on the varieties of reception and audience participation such worlds produce.

We therefore envision books on Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the Star Wars Universe, The Walking Dead’s ruined post-zombie America, Marvel’s Wakanda, Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, The Broken Earth’s the Stillness, Tin-Tin’s Africa, Akira’s Neo-Tokyo, Valérian and Laurelin’s City of a Thousand Planets, the stylized India of Bollywood film series such as Dhoom or Raaz, Full Metal Alchemist’s Amestris, and so on. But the storyworld we are most excited about is the one we haven’t thought of yet.

Interested authors should contact us for more information and consultation prior to writing anything, but we include the elements of a Minnesota book review for reference.

Elements of a Book Prospectus (University of Minnesota Press)

1.  Overview of the book, including

            •  a summary of the book’s main substantive contribution(s)

            •  an explanation of the theoretical framework that you employ

            •  a description of the methodological approach(es) that you employ

            •  a comparison of the book to others in the field, as well as an explanation of the unique contribution that this work makes (i.e., xdescribe other books and how, specifically, your differs from them)

            •  a description of the target audience(s) for the book.

2.  Table of contents and chapter-by-chapter descriptions (one page per chapter describing its relationship to the other chapters and to the overall argument of the book)

3.  Sample chapter(s), preferably including the introduction and at least two substantive chapters

4.  Current curriculum vitae (if the book is a collection of essays, include a list of contributors’ affiliations)

5.  Manuscript specifics, including estimated length, delivery date, electronic format, and any special requirements (e.g., artwork, tables, photographs, film stills)

Grad School Achebe #2: 2 Things 2 Apart!

Gerry and Aaron are back for more Things Fall Apart, talking about parts two and three of the novel! We also talk The Sopranos, Watchmen, Breaking Bad, bad fans, The Things Fall Apart film, just a little Vonnegut, and Achebe’s 1973 essay “Named for Victoria, Queen of England”…

GSA1: Things Fall Apart chapters 1-13

It’s all happening again…

Wednesday Night Links!

* Somehow, Grad School Vonnegut has returned.

* I’ll be giving a talk at UCSB next Tuesday as part of my ongoing Aurora project. Email me for details if you want them!

UCSB Lit and Environment Research Center is proud to host Prof. Gerry Canavan on June 8th, 12pm (PST) as he presents his current research on the impacts of works by celebrated science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.
All are welcome!@baker_r_r @me1odiousone @gerrycanavan pic.twitter.com/7XJwiOmWom

— UCSB English (@UCSB_English) June 2, 2021

* What Is It Like to Be a Robot Fish Man? A Conversation with Ted Chiang.

* The Personal Works of Samuel R. Delany.

* She’s appeared in over 100 Star Trek episodes and three films — meet Tracee Cocco.

* The Planet after Geoengineering, at Biennale Architettura 2021.

* ‘A Watershed Moment’ for Shared Governance. AAUP Report: Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance. Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions. University of California Lecturers Unanimously Authorize Potential Strike. Why does college cost so much? Don’t save the university — transform it.

“Some institutional leaders seem to have taken the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to turbocharge the corporate model that has been spreading in higher education over the past few decades.”@AAUP’s report on COVID-19 and Academic Governance. https://t.co/TtzA8vk8OP

— MarquetteAAUP (@MarquetteAAUP) May 26, 2021

“…it also offers a hopeful counterpoint by documenting an increase in faculty influence at some institutions, including those where faculty members benefited from leadership transitions or from being more vigilant and outspoken.”https://t.co/l3GQgeVEhr

— MarquetteAAUP (@MarquetteAAUP) June 2, 2021

* A New Hire, a Koch Grant, and a Department in Crisis. A Poisonous Atmosphere at the County College of Morris. What Do You Do with a BA in English? The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t. How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? On Decolonisation and the University. Academic Freedom on the Ropes.

* COVID-19 left college students depressed and anxious. Who will pay for their therapy?

If yesterday's story about the low rate of tenured Black woman in the US was the shot, here's a bleak chaser: in the obit today for the playwright and professor Robbie McCauley, the Globe says she was, at Emerson, "the first Black person to to receive tenure without a lawsuit."

— Jeff Melnick (@melnickjeffrey1) May 28, 2021

brb founding a journal where the only thing we do is publish articles like this pic.twitter.com/yRnNGvJjns

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2021

you've heard of unpaid internship but have you heard of reverse financed internships? pic.twitter.com/lrULKunC2M

— dexxe (@dexxe) May 28, 2021

* Oklahoma teacher says summer class canceled due to bill that bans teaching critical race theory. Why Social Justice Triggers Conservatives. Words That Mean Nothing. The Republican Party, Racial Hypocrisy, and The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, A Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case. “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Cancel culture telephone. Wild.

* Imani Perry: Ok, here’s some of the CRT books that I’ve taught and read over the years.

*This* is the source of the "evidence" that caused Boise State to shut down a 50-section class and the legislature to enact a new statute https://t.co/15wSuTy7h0 pic.twitter.com/u8e54mw0fe

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) May 24, 2021

American states making it illegal to tell the truth about American history is such a cartoonishly dystopian development and yet here we are https://t.co/fCigv6aSae

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2021

* We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying. Prayer for a Just War: Finding meaning in the climate fight. Why two women sacrificed everything to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a ‘duty of care’ to future generations. What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism.

* Gymnastics, fresh from its nightmarish decades-long rape scandal, wants to make it so being one of the greatest gymnasts of all time doesn’t get you any points.

* We’re Not Ready for the Next Pandemic. The End IS Near. No, Seriously. The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. New Mask Guidelines Don’t Take a Huge Number of Americans Into Account. Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19. How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible. If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.

* We Should Applaud the Cuban Health System — and Learn From It.

* Queer Girls in The Wilds: Refusing White Feminism’s Settler Colonial Fantasy.

* An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer.

* 500+ Biden/Dem staffers call on Biden “to end the…occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The resulting status quo is…apartheid.” Biden Steps Back On Student Loan Debt Forgiveness, Leading To Major Criticism.

https://t.co/kZhIwYzhzK pic.twitter.com/hv1lFTevyV

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 2, 2021

Texas Republicans finalize bill that would enact stiff new voting restrictions and make it easier to overturn election results. The election investigator hired by Vos wrote a police report that spawned partisan fight over voting rules in 2008. Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? Can Trump Run for President from Prison?

“sleepwalking” implies they aren’t consciously choosing this outcome knowing full well it is happening and what the outcome will be https://t.co/cS4z17P7jE

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2021

that Trump had the precise mix of narcissism, impetuousness, and indiscipline to be able to open the door, but not step all the way through it, is a sort of miracle we are perversely determined as a country not to benefit from https://t.co/eyj4vGaXAq

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2021

rough prediction of where we're headed:
1) no filibuster reform -> no voting rights protections
2) last Dem bill passed is infrastructure/welfare thing ~25-50% as big as promised
3) huge Republican wave in 2022, democracy abolished in most swing states
4) second Trump term

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) June 1, 2021

* The neoliberal order seems to be collapsing. A generation of young activists is trying to insure that it’s replaced by progressive populism, not by the fascist right.

* Crisis at the AP.

* Small Businesses Have Surged in Black Communities. Was It the Stimulus? What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? Hospitality Workers Struggle to Find Reliable, Affordable Ways Home. Giving people money makes them happier and safer.

* The Graveyard Doesn’t Like: The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says.

* We’re Being Worked to Death by Capital. Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March. Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened. The Luddites Were Right. The Blue Welfare State. On Chandler Bing’s Job.

* After 150 years of technological innovation, the problems facing the United States Postal Service are only getting harder.

* ‘No One’s Ever Talked to Me About This Before’: Social media creators are helping women and people of color identify possible symptoms of A.D.H.D., a disorder most often diagnosed in white boys.

* Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.

* Wisconsin Republicans advance ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.

* The Professor Who Became a Cop. The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops. And on the carceral futurism beat: How Will Radical Life Extension Transform Punishment?

* U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Leaked Nuclear Weapons Secrets Online: Report. Let’s hope the Russians haven’t heard about flashcards.

* The Spacefaring Paradox: Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition.

* Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions. Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages. The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly.

* Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie.

* Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive.

* How many American children have cut contact with their parents?

* Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women.

* RIP, Eric Carle.

* When Watchmen Were Klansmen. Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood found prosperity after the 1921 massacre. Then the highways arrived. Tulsa and the Myth of Objectivity.

* Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education.

* “Effective Altruism” and Disability Rights Are Incompatible.

* Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist.

The truly compassionate will shed the most tears for children that couldn't possibly exist in any universe, like the child of Marie Curie and Clark Kent. This is where our sympathy should really be directed. https://t.co/GoQ2mYJzfC

— Eric Hittinger (@ElephantEating) June 1, 2021

* Oh, you think?

* It has been hard to convey, through anecdotes or data, how bizarre the U.S. housing market has become.

* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.

* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.

* This Mommy Blogger Is Under Fire For Refusing To Stop Writing About Her 9-Year-Old After The Girl Begged Her To.

* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.

* ‘Greater Idaho’ took one step closer to being a real thing as 5 more counties voted to explore leaving liberal Oregon for conservative Idaho.

* Potatoes exonerated. Cleared of all charges!

* Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health.

* Not great: The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here. Yikes.

* The world’s riskiest project.

* Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Well, if Elon Musk says it…

* The Oral History of A Different World.

* Spanish Civil War ends.

* And Wes Anderson’s next movie has a release date. Nature is healing.

bear didn’t put up his best effort imo https://t.co/YQgwOi3ixJ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2021

I don’t care for it https://t.co/z96yAZrH4Y

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2021

Grad School Achebe: Episode Zero

The first episode of season two! Gerry and Aaron discuss the gameplan for Grad School Achebe, the history and reception of African literature inside and outside academia, Achebe’s place in the canon, his uncanny recurrent deaths on social media, the finer points of pronunciation, and more. Next week: the podcast falls apart.

Texts discussed:

Chinua Achebe in conversation with Bill Moyers (1988)

Chinua Achebe in conversation with Lewis Nkosi and Wole Soyinka (1964)

Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (2015)

Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease